The Digital Ramble | Geared Up

December 15, 2008

(Bauer Hockey)

The Digital Ramble explores aesthetic topics through materials found online.

The photographer Robbie Cooper’s wonderful pictures and video of kids playing video games got me thinking about athletics: the aesthetics of when people use equipment for play. There’s no shortage of gear being used online. The blog Be Sportier does a good job keeping tabs on new high-tech gear for athletes — sort of a highly refined market edit for the Gear Patrol set, coordinating their Y-3 sneakers with the proper vintage Dana Design bomb pack.

Backpacks from Mystery Ranch, believed to be designed for the U.S. Special Forces.

That’s worth a segue: for gear aficionados, Dana Design always made the best hiking backpacks this side of Montana, but the company was sold to K2 in 1996 and folded into Marmot in 2005, disappearing in the mix. The founder Dana Gleason went on to start Mystery Ranch, a Bozeman-based boutique pack maker, where now, according to company lore, they design backpacks for nearly every branch of U.S. Special Forces; that would explain all the military packs available.

The Texas painter Cheryl Kelley appreciates the aesthetics of beautiful cars. Her recent work gets the sex appeal right but also nails the grandeur of auto shows, where some of the world’s fastest objects sit still under lights.

Beauty need not be high-tech or cold to the touch. These seven Pendleton national park blankets, designed “since the early 1900s” (says Pendleton) to honor the parks, are art in their own right, or at least fodder for artists seeking new color palettes.

(Pendleton-usa.com)

Most sports-equipment companies have elaborate, flashy Web sites; Nike appears to introduce a new one for every colorway (Example 1, Example 2). But I like Le Coq Sportif’s site the best: searching it, say, for “tennis,” offers a neat grid interface for related content, editable by media format.

I am appaulled that the blanket is not sourced to the Hudson Bay Company. I thought I was going mad when I re-read the article a couple of times to see if I had missed it. Shame on the designer……www.hbc.com for the real thing.